Resurrection of the Word: The Scribe: Book One

THE SCRIBE: Book One Paris 1970 JACOB. l, Jacob, am Israel. I became Israel in a victorious struggle against the God Elohim. The aggressor could not overcome me. He is called lysch, the Intemporal and the Temporal combined in one single exhalation; the archetype of the complete human. I know this now because I have learned how to study since the fight. Breath of the Intemporal and breath of the Temporal: two in one. Aggression in the light of the night. In the twelfth house of solitude. Aggression in the absolute void of limited consciousness. Aggression until the black dawn. Alone in the desert of the earth and of my thoughts while waiting for the worse dangers that are coming towards me, my only weapon is my uncertainty. I have done what I was capable of doing, I have given, to the best of my ability, what I have received. I have been neither a hero nor a great nation; I have not become anyone in particular. Now lysch, breath, double breath of life, tramples upon the spoor of my being. What else of mine is there for him to suppress? Come, he calls, that I may sweep you away. No, I answer, sweep away the saints and let your flood hurl them into the universal ocean: may your copious gushing lift up the heroes to the plumes of the volcanoes: may your substance be the corpulence of the great. Therefore free me, say the Breath from on high and the Breath from below. And I . . . How do I liberate you if I have not first captured you? And he ... what are you called? Then I utter the name which has been given me. No, says lysch, you are Israel because your exhalation fought against Elohim and prevailed. From the time when there was no time and which I do not 11 remember because, perhaps, it is this very moment, God is no more (he was neither YHWH nor Elohim) and Generations are obliterated. For he who is in me is everywhere: he who is not in me is nowhere. JONAS.   For a long time the breath of the Intemporal has beset me each fleeting moment. What could I do, what can I do as yet if this intermittent spark persists in me and against me? . what does it want? The Intemporal It wants . . . it wants . . does not speak. The Eternal has never spoken to anyone. The word of the Eternal is the breath of man overwhelmed by the vanquished Intemporal. If man is not overwhelmed, if the Intemporal is not vanquished, it will be a calamity for the one who stands erect and utters the name of the Eternal. Who knows from whence come the words of the speaker? Besides, what does it matter whether they are true or false, since they are presented ready-made? The unthinkable Intemporal! Unthinkable mystery, helpless entirety of all that that exists. Of the Existing. Of That. Aggression of the Unrecognisable, supreme Consciousness. Its impact wills me to interpret it, but what have I to interpret if the impact is myself, if that is all I am, Mystery? My thoughts can produce only what they are able to think. Nothing that can be thought is external, and is within only its own standards and limitations. This beating, however, does not release me: is it the beating of the heart of the world? It stifles me wherever I go, pursues me wherever I flee. I know that I cannot interpret it, but to be false to it . . . I resist . . . I run away nevertheless. . . . The mystery embraces me. I can no longer have false dreams about the supernatural. I can no longer dream about the natural. All is starkly true in the absolute Mystery. Then why does my hand take dication from the Intemperal, causing loss of memory? Why must I be privy to its rancour, dressed in temporal things, against itself? Its explosive presence tolerates no life but its own. Its promises? Traps. It's curses? Promises. 12 THE SCRIBE : BOOK ONE Write, it says to my hand. Write: "Accursed be premature births, accursed bc Canaan. Cursed be its orchards, cursed be its grapes, cursed be its milk and honey. May its earth be cursed; Canaan the accursed". For a long time the hand went on writing, but against my wishes. I am merely Iona, called Jonas, dove of Israel. Therefore free me. And he: how are you to bc freed if I haven't first caught you? And I: What, Israel? Israel what? How will you catch me? I am not of this law nor of this earth, but of Abram the Hebrew, who was before this law, this people and this earth. And speaking thus I vanished, I fled far away, not wanting to understand this hand that did not stop writing. Thus prematurely was Quoi Israel born in 1935, thirty-five years too soon. Sometime then a messenger made mc leave this country urgently and depart with my wife and children. That was the flight into Egypt of 1939. While the undercurrent of the enormous female poured torrents of earth and blood over the globe, shattering skulls, consuming brains, pulverising bones, suffocating, burning, martyrising, reducing towns to rubble, fields to deserts, Egypt absorbed mc in the depth of her womb. The heavy Angel of certain death visited me, covered me with his wings and, as there is neither a high nor a low in his sphere, took me by hand to the interior Of the hollow mountains whose peaks soar down into the depth of the sea, right to the central flames. Ice and the mass of waters murdered me. Without being aware of it I died. Returning to earth, I again heard the voice that is not understood. "Jonas," it said, "go and tell the great city of Nineveh, Berlin-Toyko-Stalingrad, Paris-London- -Aviv that I shall destroy her because she is evil." But when I returned to Paris the survivors thanked God for being chosen to survive. From this I concluded that I had landed in the Republic of the Righteous and the Privileded, for the great city of Paris-London-Tel-Aviv had not been destroyed. Jonas was very annoyed and incensed by this. I protested to my voice (which I called YHWH). Why, I asked, have you urged me on to announce destructions which have not occurred? Now make me die (I did not know I was dead) because death is more valuable to me than life. I sat crying at the foot of the Eiffel Tower when my voice answered: why should I destroy that great city Nineveh, in which more than a hundred million men do not distinguish between their right and left, and in which there are vast numbers of animals? (Jonas, in ignorance of his death, did not know that it was his death that had saved Nineveh, because no one, if he does not die, is exempt from death.) 'Which death are you speaking about?" Mahoyael suddenly asked. "Which of the dead?" CAIN. Yes. Which death? Which of the dead? In the years after my return the Intemporal and the Temporal were, just for an instant, on the point of meeting. I felt them graze on the day when some high-ranking men . .. who were something among the French Jews, called on me and expressed their joy that I had escaped the massacres. I was surprised because I did not think I had been noticed by the members of the Synagogue. I had always lived outside Mosaic Law, outside the commemorations it practises, outside its history. Abolish the historic man and there would be no more Jews. "What was I to them, therefore? I had always proceeded to embody in myself the lines of force which my ceaseless reading of the Bible (in secular languages) allowed me to discover. They wish, I told myself, that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had lived in remote times. But if I am not them, they are nothing. They wish, quite absurdly, that Adam and Eve (as they are called) had been real people, and so too Cain and Abel, Noah and Ham, and Canaan the accursed, but if they are not the fundamental ideas of conscience offering a choice, an obligation, why are vital principles associated with them? Would that the word God was life, but then why make a 14 distinction between me alive and life? Though I am of the lowest degree what would life be worth if were not in the vital double circuit of the inconceivable Boundlessness? In this manner Cain, the emanation of the Breath of the explosion that spanned all the stratified layers caused by the Breath of compression, entered me. Well, these people of high rank who had come to see me showed that they had felt the explosive Breath of Aleph in my writings. They asked me to go and speak to them. I went to their school two or three times and was surprised by their approval on each occasion. They told mc I belonged to the most ancient of ancient traditions. "Do you really agree with what I say?" I asked. "Yes," they answered. "It would be the first blending in history of the priestly and prophetic traditions," I said, "and that would be a blessing." The day came to ask for my feee for having given the talks. It was granted me. "Give me a few pages in one of those booklets you publish where you announce 'if the voice has been silenced echo does not cease', because I tell you that the voice has not been silenced, that it is even here, although you may not be at liberty to hear it." Those pages appeared in July 1954. There I showed that the idea of a State and the idea of Israel are incompatible. I explained carefully in a few pages what made the authenticity of the voice convincing. In fact, Samuel, in his own way, had said same things and one has only to open Isaiah to find Yahweh blessing a thousand times and cursing a thousand times: thousands and thousands of times challenging the Jews, thousands of times massacring them, thousands of times inciting them to massacre. Isaiah is madly contradictory: the lunacy of yes and of no, the constancy of no to yes, of yes to no. Yahweh, it says, hid his face from the House of Jacob. And I know it is true; that I do not and shall not see his face, for if I were to sec it, it will not be his, I, Cain, who removed myself from the face of Yahweh. After the publication of these pages I saw no more, not 15 even the backs, of those who had welcomed me. I looked for these Hevel (it is the name Abel, translated in Ecclesiastes as "vanity") and did not find them. Meanwhile other Jews came to see me, but that is another story. The Six Days' War and the War of Yom Kippur" unloosed the torrent of oratory which, as one knows, hasn't calmed down yet, to which I did not contribute onc word, being extremely busy elsewhere in mastering the original code in cipher of Genesis, The Sepher Yetsira, The Song of Songs, and of diverse other fundamental texts, the key of the code having come to me. When the Temporal was filling the world with the quarrels of tortured souls I was fathoming the Source. The "pros" and the "cons" rejected me for two opposed and identical reasons: some because they classed me as "against" the State of Israel, others because, being thus classified, I was not acting "against" it. Both blotted me out. I was living alone in the country Of Nod, in the secrecy of this country where my wanderings vitalise those who, without their knowing it, resist me. It grieves me that they tear one another to pieces, some in the name of the God of curses, others in the name of the God of promises. To those who cry against the State of Israel I say: you lack the first virtue of Abraham, intelligence. Your narrow piety combines with everything retrograde in the world, but your agitation amounts to no more than the barks of dogs on the roadside when vehicles are passing. To those risking themselves in Israel's adventure I say: the great number of the enemy at your gates is an outward phenomenon. Know how to exorcise the enemy who corrodes you within: God's fanatics. Notice how they adorn him, the nonsense they make him say, the power you grant them. Exorcise the past! Renew yourselves! Forget both Moses and Auschwitz! The past is too unwieldy, don't burden the future with it! Have pity on the future. Stop devoting yourselves to an archaic mentality. Put it out Of your minds, exorcise your 16 exclusiveness! Be open to the world! Be the world! I tell you that Israel, which has given so much, can once again renew the human conscience. But not unless she renews her own, of course. Nothing from the past can be saved if there is no dying to the past. Renew yourselves! Forget! May my cry awaken you! May my distress excite you to action! Did there have to be five thousand years of dying without learning to come alive again? Exorcise the past and in a few days, a few hours, Jerusalem will gleam with a light never attained before. Get rid of the past, get rid of it, and Japhet will gladly come to live in the tents of Schem. . .. But why, why should I write so many words? Am I better than Daniel, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Samuel? Have they not said, and said again, the same things? And to what avail? Following the Israeli's day-dream of their invincible might, has not the "War of Yom Kippur" now achieved the real aim of the Jews? Their aim against themselves? What an extraordinary feat! They, and they only, of all people could have accomplished it. See their power: they have stirred the whole Planet against them. They have awakened all the potentates of Arabia to the perception of their fantastic power. Our proud civilisation that dances, bows or kneels to the rhythm of the liquid drawn from the pipes, suddenly realises its madness. It sees that it was happily rushing to disaster, and welcomes a warning, hoping that it has come just in time to avoid some strangc Apocalypse, yet perceiving it coming amidst the ruins of all its structures, every one of them, when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end (Daniel x-11, 7). I will comment upon it later, Mahoyail interrupted. Jacob, Jonas, Cain, what are you now? JUDAS. In this matter Matthew speaks truthfully: I gave this sign: Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast. Forthwith approaching him I said "Hail, Master!" and I kissed him. And he said unto me, "Friend, what you have come to do, do it." 17 'Friend, friend!" Who but I had he ever called this? "Friend." Could he lie? Had he said to me "Don't do it", wouldn't I have been able to mislead the guards? To say "It's night, I see badly, look for him", and make him escape? Must I repeat it again? This identification was useless because all knew him well from his public interventions that had given great offence, and knew where to find him, in the place where it was customary for him to be so that anyone could find him. I had to deliver the Light (Him) to the world of men (Darkness) acknowledged it by paying the symbolic price (30). Must I repeat it again? Peter said: ' 'May it please God that this shall not happen", and the Rabbi rebuffed him: "Get behind me Satan". But I accepted the Satan which the Rabbi had inserted in me, and I forced Satan, for the first time in history, to receive delivery of God. Thus Satan and God, becoming one and the same thing, ceased to exist, and Ben- Adam alone remains, one Breath, Breath of the heights and of the depths, one and multiple, the Intemporal in the Continuity of time. Today in 1975 1 say once again for the last time, after having said so much: the Vital Truth, one Breath in two, two Breaths in one, replaces both Satan and God. For two thousand years I have waited to say this openly, I, Judas, the friend, the only friend of my beloved Master in whom I am lost, in whom I have lost myself, in whom I breathe. Rabbi Yhshwh, why, why do they call you Jesus Christ? What do I who knew you and saw you know? Rabbi Yhshwh, Israel, neither God nor Messiah but Israel, why am I horrified of man confined in the effigy of what you are not? He, dead? He alive in the hunted look of the hunted Jew. Jewish Judas, without whom the world would be deprived of the Word; Judas, without whom there is no Jesus, Jesus-Israel. In those days he was called the miraculous Rabbi, because those, whether friends or not, who came near him felt a great 18 force emanating from him and did not know of what it con- sisted. Some saw him surrounded by a strange light. I, the man of the Night, lived in it. Our secret meetings (he and I alone) were always at night. In the Orient he had learned how to leave his body while sleeping, and taught me how to do it. He also knew how to make himself visible far from where his body was. These things are known today and one is not astonished to see them in India. Nevertheless, though these phenomena are of no importance, for the Rabbi and me they opened the doors of the Kingdom of the Dead (for on those nocturnal travels we met those who knew they were dead, or didn't know it, who saw us, or who, believing they were asleep, slept). "Do you see?" he said to me, "This isn't Hades. The Greeks delude themselves; this is the region of light." "1t is luminous, Rabbi," I answered, "because you illuminate lt." "1t is so because . . . but look carefully," he said. "Rabbi, I would give my life for love of you," I said. Smiling as he spoke, he said: "You've had a good look at it". "What becomes of the dead?" I asked. "What becomes of a drop of honey stirred into a basin of water?" he replied. "The water becomes sweet," I answered, "the drop permeates the whole basin." "lf the contents of the basin are stirred into the Jordan where is the drop of honey? And when the waters of the Jordan flow into the sea where is the drop of honey?" I think it is still there," I said, "lost and not lost, dissolved, undiscoverable . . . besides, I know nothing about it, Rabbi, the sea is so salty. But what does the honey or the salt of the sea matter, Rabbi? I would give my life for love of you." 'You see, you do know," he said. When he was teaching in the synagogue he spoke in traditional Hebrew, but to some people he revealed the secret code of signs and numbers (of which he reminded me one night nearly 19 two thousand years later). Few were they who understood and few are there today who wish to understand. When he says Shamaim, which is the Breath of the Waters, it is taken to mean "the sky"; when he Says Abben, which is father and son together, and philosopher's stone, it is taken to mean the apostle Peter: when he says Ben-Adam nobody understands. The day camc when what had to be done was decided (how the idea of torment tormented him!). . . "Nevertheless it must bee done", he told me, "it must be known that whoever dies in the Breath of Aleph-Bayt, that is, AB, which is Father, restores the manifold life of the Breath. For there is more than Jonas here, who died without knowing it.. I must die knowing it and predicting "You shall raise my body,"" he said, and we shall decide what comes next." On that night, that terrible night, I went to the sepulchre alone, careful not to be seen. I lifted the slab. The body was lain down. My Master, standing upright, was completely light. "This body must be got out of the way," he said to me, "because if they see me as well as the body they won't understand." "Can you help me to lift the body, Rabbi?" I said. I don't know exactly how but the body was upright and I was carrying it: the left armpit on my left shoulder, the arm held by mine, my right arm pressing it at the waist; and my luminous Master standing upright, covering, but taller than the body. I don't know if what seemed to animate the body was my force or another's, or if I were carrying it, or if I were being carried. We reached the Jordan before dawn. Then the waters took us.

Carlo Suares, Resurrection of the Word, Shambhala, 1974, pp. 11-20